by Logan Jacobs
I ran in silence for a few steps as I considered her question. “Well, I believe Diamond, as you know her, has the slightly more dominant personality,” I concluded. “And I have noticed that she tends to take turns a bit faster too.”
Florenia giggled and flung herself into my arms. She was really quite light. Not as diminutively child-sized as Ilandere, but compared to Lizzy, whose body had more heft from her muscle mass and exaggerated curves, the ex-vestal had a sleek and willowy figure.
“Don’t break my carriage, Master!” Willobee grumbled as he pulled the door shut behind her.
I clutched Florenia tight through her billowing pink robes, put on a spurt of speed to catch back up to the driver’s seat, and tossed my beautiful companion up. Then I leapt up after her. She handed me the ponies’ reins that I had discarded before and nestled herself against me with her head resting on my shoulder.
“You were going to tell me earlier about how your lifestyle was unsuitable for someone of your station,” I prompted her. “Or something like that.”
“Oh, that. It isn’t important anymore. Do you really want to know?” she asked.
“Of course I do. It won’t change my opinion of you,” I said. At least, I doubted that it would. Finding out that Lizzy was a full-fledged man-eating wolf-monster by night sometimes, instead of just a prettily wolf-tinged girl, hadn’t affected my desire for her or my respect for her scrappy survivor’s mentality. It just meant that now I could incorporate her into all my battle plans.
“All right. Well. It can be rather enjoyable to confess my sins,” she mused. “Risky, too, though. My parents’ household priest started stalking me after I told him a few too many secrets. And one of the senior vestals at Nillibet’s temple fainted. But then again they would faint over absolutely anything there. Like another girl forgetting to wear her veil. Or burning a croissant.”
I pinched Florenia’s slender waist and made her squeal. “I’m guessing you got up to worse than burning a few croissants,” I growled.
“Oh yes. I burnt absolutely everything that I was put in charge of in the kitchens for the first few weeks,” Florenia replied solemnly. “Or added salt instead of sugar. Or dropped the eggshell in along with the egg. And it was all on purpose. It’s because I was so angry about being stuck there, and the way they treated me there, like there was something profoundly wrong with me. But then I realized that it wasn’t really the vestals’ fault that I was there. And their perverse and impossibly narrow worldview wasn’t truly their fault either. Some of them, maybe, were innately awful. But others had just always been taught that way, and they weren’t clever enough to think past all those walls other people had implanted in their minds. And either way, most of them didn’t have a single pleasure left in life besides fucking baking. So I started baking well to make them happy in the only way they could be.”
“Why did your parents send you to the temple?” I asked. “Surely they knew you would be miserable there.”
“That was the point,” she replied. “It was a punishment. And I had to go along with it because they told me that if I left the temple before they died, they would cut off my inheritance.”
“But… they’re not dead, are they?” I asked.
“Not as far as I know,” she replied with a shrug. “But I decided that I don’t really much care anymore. Not about them or what they think, and not about the inheritance.”
“Freedom is freedom. One can always make more money,” I agreed.
She laughed. “It wasn’t just money. It was a duchy. A significant one.”
“You’re a duchess?” I exclaimed.
“No. My mother is a duchess,” she corrected me. “And I would have been one someday, in my own right, since I have no brothers. But I never will be now. And I am no longer even what I was, which is the daughter of a duke… the Lady Florenia di Valentis.”
“You mean you gave up the ‘di Valentis’ for me?” I asked her.
“Yes, but I know you will repay me,” she said as her eyes stared into mine.
I hesitated. “Uh… I have a few things to take care of first, but I suppose someday in the future, I could try to conquer a duchy for you.”
“No, that is not what I mean. You will repay me tonight,” she replied with a meaningful smile.
“That I can swear to, my lady,” I agreed hoarsely. I held the ponies’ reins in one hand and traced the inside of her thigh with the other. “But since we must pass the long hours in the meanwhile, will you tell me how you invoked the wrath of the di Valentis house?”
“Yes, if it will please you, but it is not a very interesting story,” she warned me. “It all started when I was fourteen. An ambassador from the duke of Arjen who sought my hand in marriage and was too old and infirm to make the journey himself arrived at our hall. But the ambassador’s retinue included his handsome son. And the son, well, he did want to be a loyal servant to the duke of Arjen, but his cock wanted other things. And it was a nice cock, the first one I had ever become acquainted with, but then we got caught. And that was such a catastrophe for all parties involved that both the ambassador and my parents could trust each other to keep their mouths shut. So the ambassador went back to the duke and advised him that I was plain and that he would be better off taking my younger sister instead. So he did. Years later, shortly before he died of a heart attack and left my sister an extremely wealthy widow, the duke saw a portrait of me and ordered the ambassador executed.”
I gaped at her.
“Don’t look like that,” she chided me. “You’re much, much handsomer than he was. And you did ask, you know. Are you sure you really want to know more?”
“Of course I do,” I said as I squeezed her thigh. “I want to know everything about you. What happened next?”
“Well, I had a normal childhood, you know,” she said. “It wasn’t all ambassadors’ sons, executions, and other scandals. It was mostly reading, dancing, language lessons, hawking, and being fitted for new gowns for every dinner.”
I was about to question her definition of a normal childhood, but she continued.
“But if you mean you want to know about the next incident that pushed my parents toward eventually abandoning me in a temple, well, it was… a similar sort of thing. This one was a prince. Blonde, chiseled looks. I didn’t even think my parents would be angry this time because they’re very politically ambitious people. But we snuck around behind their backs anyway because it was the polite thing to do. And the prince did want to marry me although I wasn’t so sure I wanted to marry him. I just wanted--” Florenia stopped herself. “Well, anyway, everything was fine, until the king ended the century-long war his kingdom had been waging and forced his son to marry the enemy king’s daughter as part of the peace treaty. My lover killed himself by jumping off a tower. And one thing led to another and then the war started back up again. Once the gossip spread, everyone found out, and guess who they blamed? Me.”
“I… ah… how unfortunate,” I said. “So that’s when your parents packed you off to Nillibet’s?”
“Oh, no,” Florenia said in surprise. “I hope I haven’t given you the wrong impression entirely about them. They did love me once, you know. And they wouldn’t have given up on me that easily.”
“Ah… then what exactly…”
“Hmm. They refused to speak to me for a week and gave away my horse after the stable boy incident. And when my other sister’s betrothed hit his head on a marble pillar so hard that he forgot how to talk and clucked like a chicken for a week, the whole family blamed me, but I really hadn’t known that he was going to walk by just as I got out of the bath, or I really would have sent a maid for a robe,” Florenia assured me earnestly. “Oh, and then there were the parties. That was when they really decided they needed to get rid of me. So many suitors wouldn’t give me a moment’s peace and quiet, you see, that for efficiency’s sake, I started inviting them all over on the same day of the month and then I’d invite my girl cousins over too and dy
e all my handmaidens’ hair the same shade of chestnut as mine and have everyone wear masks. And get them all drunk enough that quite a lot more of them ended up believing they’d possessed me than the number that actually had possessed me. And that worked to satisfy some of them although others got more obstinate than ever and started thinking I had an obligation to marry them. But then my father got home early from a hunting trip in the middle of one of these parties. And saw about twenty heirs fucking about thirty masked girls with hair just like his daughter’s. And an earl’s son in the middle of all this who was so drunk that he wasn’t fucking any girl at all; instead he was enthusiastically humping my father’s very favorite marble statue. A statue… of the goddess Nillibet,” Florenia concluded darkly. “And you know how that ended.”
“That’s rough luck, no doubt about it,” I said. From anyone else, these tales would have been implausible to say the least. But Florenia’s face with its carven angles and sensuous curves really did seem designed to ignite men’s wildest fantasies and drive them over the edge into madness. I hadn’t even seen her body yet. I had only felt it through her vestal’s robes, and I knew I wanted her.
“I suppose, but it would’ve been worse luck to be born plain,” she remarked.
Based on everything the disowned duke’s daughter had just told me, I for one was not convinced that her life wouldn’t actually have been easier if she had indeed been born plain. But that didn’t mean that I could have ever brought myself to change a hair on her head if it had been up to me.
“Maybe you could have focused more on your baking career then, Duchess?” I teased as I ran my free hand up the back of her neck, traced it along her angular jaw, and then ran my thumb along her plump lower lip. She bit my finger, then licked it.
“I am not a duchess, and why would I wish to be a baker or a duchess when I could be the consort of a god?” she whispered with heat crackling through her velvety voice.
She climbed onto my lap and kissed me. I felt a flash of vague worry about relatively trivial details such as the fact that anyone on the road, including the centaurs once they returned, could see us, and that I couldn’t see the road in return, and that all of our lives depended on my currently impaired driving skills.
Then the hazel-eyed beauty slid down my chest, knelt at my feet where she was mostly concealed from view by the front of the driver’s box, and unlaced my pants. She tugged them down just far enough to allow me to spring out of them, stroked my shaft with lust burning in her eyes, and took me gently but urgently into her mouth.
She reached her hand inside my pants to cup and fondle my balls as she slid my cock in and out of her mouth. With her deft tongue she painted firm stripes along its length and toyed with the tip. She panted and whimpered with vicarious arousal when she felt it twitch and throb and when I uttered groans and oaths under my breath. Her back was arched, her fingers were digging into the sides of my ass to pull me deeper in, and her whole body was tensed with anticipation by the time I exploded into her mouth. She swallowed, licked her perfect lips, and sighed with satisfaction.
Florenia looked at me with bright, triumphant eyes as she resettled herself on the bench beside me. My hands were clumsy as I fumbled to relace my pants. The blood was pounding in my head, my entire body felt limp, and I wondered a little as if I might float out of it.
“Is that an acceptable mode of worship, Qaar’endoth?” the ex-vestal inquired. I answered her with a deep kiss full on the mouth.
Not long after that, we heard the pounding cadence of horse hooves and the two centaurs arrived, both of them sparkling and windswept.
“Welcome back! So what have you seen? What lies ahead?” I asked them.
“Yes, what terrors await us? What infinite bliss?” Florenia added dreamily.
Elodette gave her an odd look. “You’ll have to ask an oracle for that one.”
“We found the bridge!” Ilandere announced excitedly. “But it’s, er, it’s broken, Vander.” She looked at me worriedly as if it was somehow her fault, and I might blame her for it. Well, I had seen her break that bed at the inn by jumping on it and barely seem to notice, but a stone bridge? Surely that didn’t have anything to do with the little centaur. Or the large one for that matter.
“It’s broken?” I repeated curiously. “You mean it’s falling apart from disrepair?”
“No, it looks like someone demolished it on purpose,” the little centaur princess explained.
“Why would someone do that?” Florenia asked as she delicately adjusted her robes.
“To stop someone else from crossing,” Elodette replied grimly.
“Yes, but who? Thorvinians?” Florenia guessed. She looked over at me and smiled. “I would like to watch you destroy them, Vander. Watching you fight is very… exciting.”
“Well, how are we going to get across?” Ilandere asked as she clutched both arms around her slender torso. “There’s a river underneath. With a really strong current.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll find a way,” I told her. “How far ahead is this bridge?”
“About three miles,” Elodette estimated. The powerfully built centaur was watching me sharply with her cold gray eyes, and I guessed that she was withholding her judgment and her taunts for when I had to deal with this bridge problem directly.
Well, I wasn’t about to give her that satisfaction.
Chapter Nine
When we reached the bridge, “broken” turned out to be an understatement. It had been about four feet wide and twenty feet long originally but it now looked like a couple of full-blood mountain trolls had been using it to host death matches. Jagged stone ledges jutted out just a few feet from each shore to show where the bridge used to be, with a huge fifteen-foot gap in the middle. I supposed Ilandere and Elodette could probably clear it, but they were the only ones. Lizzy maybe could in her wolf form, but that would mean waiting for night and crossing in the dark.
I stopped the carriage, dismounted, and walked out on the intact portion of the bridge that extended from our side to get a better look at the situation. The broad river churning past thirty feet below looked icy and forbidding. And condensation and spray from the water had turned what remained of the stones themselves icy and slick. That made me change my mind about even Ilandere and Elodette jumping. They might be able to make the distance, but if their hooves slipped upon landing, they could easily fall in the river and break their necks or legs.
“So, Vander, what do we do?” Elodette asked.
I turned toward her in irritation, under the assumption that the centaur was mocking me, but then I realized that it was a genuine question. Ilandere’s perpetually tough-and-superior-acting handmaiden was actually asking my advice.
She seemed to become self-conscious under my attention and maybe misinterpreted it as contempt, because she informed me hastily, “I can jump much farther than that gap, of course. Probably I could jump the river without any bridge at all. But Ilandere can’t. And a rider might throw my balance off. I wouldn’t know since I’ve never had one.”
“We could go up or down the river until we find another crossing, or a narrower point,” Florenia suggested.
I didn’t like that idea. I knew that in a remote part of the countryside like this, the next-nearest crossing could be days away if it existed at all. And every moment we wasted was another moment that the monsters who had ended Simon, Peter, and Meryn’s lives were allowed to continue breathing and slaughter more innocents. There had been many moments on this journey when I had let myself become distracted from those hard truths, sure. There had been moments when I had let Willobee’s marvelous voice carry me off on amusing gnomish adventures and moments when I had completely given myself up to pleasure with Lizzy and Florenia.
But, during all those moments, we had still been on the move toward our next destination.
“I don’t like the look of this at all, Master,” Willobee said as he waddled up laboriously, still gowned in chainmail. I had told him a few ti
mes that the human-sized bandit’s mail shirt looked too heavy for him and asked how much fighting he planned to participate in, anyway, but he always gave one of his vague and meandering replies that I couldn’t make heads or tails of, and eventually I gave up. Mostly because if a stray blade or arrow did come the gnome’s way, I sure as hell didn’t want to be the guy who had made him take his only protection off beforehand.
“Aw, don’t you worry none, little gnome, I’m sure I can fling you across just like a ball and you’ll keep rolling thataway,” Lizzy offered. She reached for Willobee, but he danced out of range of her questing hands as his chainmail jingled and his ostrich feather wagged wildly.
“If we are going to jump, I will carry Willobee,” Ilandere also offered, rather bravely I thought. Fifteen feet might not be a big deal for a horse in general, but whereas Elodette was more athletic-looking than any horse I’d ever seen, Ilandere was smaller than any horse I’d ever seen. Almost as small as the ponies. That was another problem. There was no way the ponies could jump the gap even if the centaurs could carry all the rest of us across safely, and I didn’t feel right about abandoning them. Not unless my mission absolutely required it.
“What is it about the severe likelihood of dropping me in a chasm to drown in a river that suddenly has all the beautiful women so eager to get their hands on me?” the round little gnome wondered aloud. “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you ladies, but Willobee of Clan Benniwumporgan is not budging one inch from this side of the shore until there is something solid connecting this side to that side. No sirree.”
I remembered the grappling hook that I had brought all the way from the temple. Well, that was a good start. A horse couldn’t cross a rope, but at least I could get one of me on the other side. I fetched it from my pack and uncoiled the rope that was tethered to it. Then I found a tree near the shore on the other side that I liked the look of.